Group work experience as a consultant on resume?

Question

A friend asked me for help to translate her resume. At first her experience seems fractured (lot of short term positions), but after reading it a couple of times I noticed that these were as a consultant for the same firm.

Does it make more sense to list each experience as you would do for independent companies? Or group it somehow to make more obvious the continuous experience under her consultancy?

Let say she is consultant at Software Enthusiast. She uses the follow format for each entry:

The workplace : (05/2014 – 12/2014: 7 months) 
Original poster

Super User: (11/2012 – 04/2014: 17 months) 
NotSoSuperUser

Stack Overflow: (01/2012 – 10/2012: 10 months) 
Serial Downvoter

I barely shifted periods by some months, otherwise it is as in the resume. I feel like it has two problems :

• Not highlighting the consultant company enough really give the impression of a job hopper
• In fact as consultant for that company she has 34 straight months of employment, or almost three years. Considering her total experience is 5 years, that's a big slice.

Is my impression correct?

Answer 1

As with many things regarding resumes, it depends what impression you're trying to give. Particularly early in my career, I was looking to fill space on my resume, so broke various bits of my previous experience down and went in to all the different things I did as much as possible, to give examples of all the things I was willing to turn my hand to and how I was willing and able to pick up new things quickly. Now, I group it all together and explain it more concisely and in less detail.

I think the "coming across as a job hopper" concern is valid, so I'd suggest grouping the roles together to make it clear that they're all for the same company (group them under "Stack Exchange" in this example), and try and tie them together in terms of the the skills acquired. But I think more important would be talking about it at interview, and being able to explain the various roles as some sort of natural progression, or willingness to pick up all sorts of necessary tasks across the business, and make it come across as a positive thing.

Answer 2

If she has 5 years experience, 3 at this company, I'd certainly group them while keeping them distinct. She has at least two roles, and this one gives her a lot of variety to talk about, so I don't think she needs to split it to pad things - the risk of looking like a job hopper is more of a real risk to her than lack of variety/experience

I'd format it as:

> Overall consultancy position (current job)
   Responsibilities, description etc (high level), making it clear that it was 
   a consultancy role which involved secondments within other companies

   + Secondment 3
      Quick description of project and achievements
   + Secondment 2
      Quick description of project and achievements
   + Secondment 1
      Quick description of project and achievements

> Previous Job
   Responsibilities, description etc
   + Projects worked on within company

This is a great way to make it clear that all of the three "roles" (which are excellent to talk about) were within one consistent employment. In short, she's got the best of both worlds - lots of real world experience and diversity for such a short career, along with a decent amount of loyalty/longeivity within the company: plus they clearly thought she was good enough to keep sending her on-site.

Answer 3

I’ve been working on improving my CV, mostly applying information I’ve found on the Internet. The consensus seems to be that a CV should not exceed 2 pages. I have therefore tried to boil my 20+ year career down to a 2 page document.

I have been a consultant for the last 10 years which means lots of clients and projects. It has proven impossible for me to boil this down to 2 pages when I list all clients and a short description of what the projects entailed. So now I have a 3 page document that I’m satisfied with.

As an experiment, I created another version of my CV simply listing my employers and explaining my responsibilities and highlighting some achievements without even specifically mentioning customer names and specific projects. This did allow me to produce a 2 page CV but I don’t feel comfortable with it. It just appears there is too much information that is missing.

The argument that my 3 page CV might look like that of a job hopper hadn’t yet occurred to me. However, I have this idea that future employers expect the CV of a consultant to look like a list of projects. I may be wrong of course.

It’s very difficult to tell what would work best.